Response to Spelling's Nov 2022 Op-Ed

This week the Dallas Morning news published yet another pro test-based accountability article/op-ed by someone of renown—former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings—who along with a great many others has now invested more than three decades promoting a theory of action (“test-based accountability will transform America’s educational system if only the damn educators would get their act together”) that so far has failed to produce the desired result. Thirty years. 

Can you imagine a parallel in medicine, engineering, business, or literally any other profession or organization? You can’t because it doesn’t exist. It wouldn’t be allowed to exist. To doggedly stick with what has not yet worked for thirty years is literally unthinkable. So how is it still a thing? How is it that so many people fail to consider that maybe when it comes to accountability we got something wrong? 

The claims made here for test-based accountability are old: those who do not support such an accountability want to go easy on schools, accept mediocrity, award lots of participation trophies rather than have high expectations, and don’t care about kids. Those same folks are opposed to transparency, basic academics, and common sense. And they certainly don’t care about equity.

There is so much ignorance in these claims. Ignorance about how accountability in effective organizations works. Ignorance of the model of accountability selected for schools. Ignorance of what a test score is and the limitations in the information it provides. Ignorance of what sort of transparency into schools would be useful. Ignorance of what equity even is.

But the greatest amount of ignorance is in the form of a self-own because test-based accountability is in fact guilty of doing all the things its proponents insist will happen without it.

The fact is test-based accountability goes easy on schools filled with students that will have relatively high test scores regardless of the schools they attend, misnaming that success and handing those schools what is literally a participation trophy.

Equity? Is it equity to punish and stigmatize schools filled with students who start their educations well behind their wealthier peers, who live in communities with fewer opportunities to learn, without bothering to see what value is being added to the students’ lives? Is it equity to demand high test scores for all, or is it equity to maximize the opportunity for every child to have access to what it takes to be a successful adult? (Which, by the way, has nothing to do with a test score.)

Transparency? Education is the only profession—the only one—that regularly flings reams of highly technical data (mostly in the form of annual test scores that don’t mean what most people assume) at the world absent a fact-based interpretation and calls it transparency. Transparency is supposed be about understanding, which can’t happen if your doctor just flings your blood work at you, if a statistician arrives at a conclusion and expects you to see the same across a page’s long equation, or if a CFO drops a complex financial statement on your desk and hopes you can ferret out their vision in the numbers.

The first step in transparency is interpretation, an indication of where you are effective and where you need to be more effective. The second is the use of a variety of evidence to support the interpretations. A data fling amounts to little more than opaque gibberish to those who lack the technical skills to understand it and is always subject to whatever mis-interpretive whims (and really bad math) anyone might want to apply. It is anything but transparent.

And test-based accountability isn’t about high expectations for students or schools, continuous improvement, or about seeing to student needs. It is about school test scores complying with the state’s predetermined formula for some label, a formula that is all but guaranteed to stigmatize the schools serving our poorest children and laud those serving our wealthiest, without knowing if either is even warranted.

The fact is that test-based accountability commits every crime it lays at the feet of those opposed to it. And yet somehow it endures. For thirty years.

Real accountability would be to students and their parents for seeing to student need and benefitting students. Real transparency would make clear when a school, a district, or a state, was and was not being effective, and be willing to share as much of the evidence as was needed to support those interpretations. Real accountability would treat equity as ensuring that 100% of the students walking across a graduation stage will have add access to what it takes to live a successful life. And real accountability would never make the colossal mistake of reducing a school to a metric, number, or label and think it had done a good thing.

And which is truly the higher stakes accountability? The one where all the adults in the school get into trouble for yesteryear’s test scores in a few subjects that contain nothing about student benefit? Or the one where the adults in the school must constantly account for their effectiveness at benefitting their students now and into the future? Which is a school board or a community more likely to understand and act on confidently, such that changes will be meaningful and not arbitrary because real transparency exists? Which is better for the students, their parents, and their communities? As a parent, which would actually help you understand your child’s school, whether your child’s needs were being met, and how you might engage the school in benefitting your child?

What should be clear as well is that all accountabilities—even bad ones—are high stakes affairs. All of them can result in someone losing their job. And since that is a high price to pay, shouldn’t failure mean something? Like we didn’t deliver the benefits it was our job to deliver? Not that we happened to work in a school that served lots of underprivileged students and thus will have a hard time complying with the state’s formula no matter how effective we might be. Shouldn’t we look inside schools, to determine where each is effective and where each has work to do, so that high stakes judgments have a rational basis? How else can the system improve? How else can we know when change is warranted?

Here’s a three-part rubric for whether any of us should listen to people making the kinds of claims I’m criticizing here. If:

1. the person can explain several different types of accountabilities, what they are used for, and the consequences of misuse,
2. they can explain what a standardized test is designed to do and what it isn’t, and,
3. they will accept that every school—with very few exceptions—is effective in some ways and not as effective in others, no matter what demographic they serve, and improvement as a school or a school system requires those truths,

then they are worth a listen. If they can’t offer up at least a basic answer to these, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and we should call them on it.

Final point: I don’t mean to criticize intentions or rhetoric. Spellings and most of those who share her views are surprisingly well-intentioned, and they use a lot of words that we should all agree with. But then they opt for accountability solutions that have nothing to do with that intent or those words. I’d like to think that is an honest mistake, because if we agree on the words and the intent, which I think we largely do, maybe one day we can get to a similar understanding on how we get there.